MTN Group has announced a major commitment to support the development of African language datasets, responding to a call by Nigeria’s Minister of Communications, Innovation and Digital Economy, Dr. Bosun Tijani, for increased public and private investment in artificial intelligence research. The announcement was made during The Y’ello Chair Vodcast at the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) in New York.
This pledge is a significant step forward for a continent where over 2,000 languages remain underrepresented in AI systems. Without structured and inclusive datasets, Africa’s 1.5 billion people risk being marginalized in the global shift toward AI-powered services in education, healthcare, commerce, and governance.
MTN’s commitment builds on the momentum of the Nigerian Atlas for Languages and AI at Scale (N-ATLAS), an open-source multilingual model launched earlier this year through a partnership between the Nigerian government and Awarri Technologies. N-ATLAS aims to digitize and preserve Nigeria’s 500+ languages, offering a scalable framework that can be adapted by other African nations.
Ralph Mupita, MTN Group President and CEO, emphasized the importance of inclusive digital transformation:
We have to avoid the risk of Africans being a digital underclass. The outcomes we want are that people are digitally included, economically included, and that they have dignity.
MTN’s support goes beyond cultural preservation, it signals a strategic shift in its role within Africa’s digital economy. By backing language datasets, MTN is positioning itself not just as a telecom provider, but as a technology enabler in the continent’s emerging AI ecosystem.
While global tech giants like Google and Meta have experimented with African language models, their efforts have often lacked sustained commercial investment. MTN’s involvement brings corporate scale and long-term commitment to an area traditionally driven by academic and grassroots efforts.
MTN joins a growing community of organizations working to close the language gap in African AI:
- Masakhane: A grassroots research collective building translation models for African languages since 2019.
- Mozilla’s Common Voice: Crowdsourcing speech datasets in languages such as Kiswahili, Luganda, and Wolof.
- Lelapa AI (South Africa): Developing natural language processing tools for under-resourced African languages.
MTN’s entry into this space could accelerate the development of locally grounded AI solutions, reducing reliance on global systems that often overlook African linguistic and cultural contexts.
As AI continues to shape the future of digital services, MTN’s pledge marks a pivotal moment for African inclusion in the global tech landscape. The success of this initiative will depend on collaboration across governments, academia, and the private sector, and could redefine how Africa contributes to and benefits from the AI revolution.
